BERT's Conceptual Cartography: Mapping the Landscapes of Meaning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Haket, Nina, Daniels, Ryan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Haket, Nina
Daniels, Ryan
author_facet Haket, Nina
Daniels, Ryan
contents Conceptual Engineers want to make words better. However, they often underestimate how varied our usage of words is. In this paper, we take the first steps in exploring the contextual nuances of words by creating conceptual landscapes -- 2D surfaces representing the pragmatic usage of words -- that conceptual engineers can use to inform their projects. We use the spoken component of the British National Corpus and BERT to create contextualised word embeddings, and use Gaussian Mixture Models, a selection of metrics, and qualitative analysis to visualise and numerically represent lexical landscapes. Such an approach has not yet been used in the conceptual engineering literature and provides a detailed examination of how different words manifest in various contexts that is potentially useful to conceptual engineering projects. Our findings highlight the inherent complexity of conceptual engineering, revealing that each word exhibits a unique and intricate landscape. Conceptual Engineers cannot, therefore, use a one-size-fits-all approach when improving words -- a task that may be practically intractable at scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_07190
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BERT's Conceptual Cartography: Mapping the Landscapes of Meaning
Haket, Nina
Daniels, Ryan
Computation and Language
Conceptual Engineers want to make words better. However, they often underestimate how varied our usage of words is. In this paper, we take the first steps in exploring the contextual nuances of words by creating conceptual landscapes -- 2D surfaces representing the pragmatic usage of words -- that conceptual engineers can use to inform their projects. We use the spoken component of the British National Corpus and BERT to create contextualised word embeddings, and use Gaussian Mixture Models, a selection of metrics, and qualitative analysis to visualise and numerically represent lexical landscapes. Such an approach has not yet been used in the conceptual engineering literature and provides a detailed examination of how different words manifest in various contexts that is potentially useful to conceptual engineering projects. Our findings highlight the inherent complexity of conceptual engineering, revealing that each word exhibits a unique and intricate landscape. Conceptual Engineers cannot, therefore, use a one-size-fits-all approach when improving words -- a task that may be practically intractable at scale.
title BERT's Conceptual Cartography: Mapping the Landscapes of Meaning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07190